Total Information Storage of Human Civilization: 295 Exabytes

If you were to combine every CD, analog tape, book, newspaper and USB wafer and put all that information on one hard drive, how big would it be? The answer, say researchers at the University of Southern California, is 259 exabytes.

If you were to combine every CD, analog tape, book, newspaper and USB wafer and put all that information on one hard drive, how big would it be? The answer, say researchers at the University of Southern California, is 295 exabytes.

An exabyte is the equivalent of 1 million terabytes, a fairly common capacity in hard drives these days. There are currently no drives in the exabyte range, although Apple hasn't commented on this story.

The figure is an estimate, and it's based on figures from 2007. Researchers Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez at the University of Southern California set out to determine the world's technological capacity to "store, communicate, and compute information." The pair published their results in the journal Science today.

The researchers looked at 60 different technologies—from optical media to paper—to determine how much data human civilization can store. If all the information were in book form, it would cover the U.S. three times over, Hilbert told the BBC.

What's unknown is how much of that storage would be blank. Although the world may be capable of storing hundreds of exabytes of data, does the world really have enough text, photos, audio, and video to fill all that space?

Regardless, what is clear from the study is that the demand for capacity is increasing. Hilbert and Lopez looked at data from 1986 to 2007, and they found that globally stored information expanded 23% per year on average.

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